Southern Cone Travel

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

One of my fondest travel memories dates from the early 1980s
at Santiago’s Mercado Central (above), where
a penguin—probably a Humboldt, but perhaps a Magellanic—roamed among
fishmongers who fed him scraps at a site where Texas food writer Robb Walsh found
“a display of fishes and shellfish so vast and unfamiliar that I felt I was
observing the marine life of another planet.”

That penguin’s no longer around—nowadays, at least, we prefer
to see our penguins in the wild—but that seafood cornucopia still survives here.
There are caveats, though, as the sustainability has become an issue commercial
fishing has expanded in the southern seas.

One key resource is the so-called “Chilean
sea bass,” with its firm but buttery flesh, which has had a high-profile
presence on the international market since the 1990s. In parts of the southern
oceans, this species of codfish – known to fisheries specialists by the rather
less marketable name of “Patagonian toothfish” – has suffered from rampant
overfishing in the waters bordering Patagonia and Antarctica. It’s worth noting
that California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium maintains a Seafood Watch Program that evaluates
individual species according to the environmental impact of specific fisheries,
and ranks them in terms of “best,” “good,” and “avoid.”

Oddly, however, the Argentine toothfish catch goes
unmentioned in Seafood Watch. In California, my home supermarket Berkeley Bowl sells “Chilean
seabass (product of Argentina)” at nearly US$30 per pound (roughly US$66 per kg).
I’m generally confident they follow ethical purchasing policies, but the Aquarium’s
Seafood Watch Engagement Coordinator, Peter Adames, acknowledged that they have
no information on the Argentine toothfish catch (and he was unaware that
Berkeley Bowl sold it). He did add that “I'll check with our science team to
see if there is an assessment in the works or on the horizon.”

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

When it’s winter
in the north, the days get shorter, and the weather gets rougher,
it’s common to dream of island getaways. For many Northern Hemisphere residents,
that might involve a hop to the Caribbean, but I prefer the southernmost region
of the Americas. Two of South America’s biggest islands – Chiloé and Tierra del
Fuego (pictured above) – arouse my own enthusiasm but, after spending a couple nights in Santiago recently, I chose to
bypass the rest of the continent to spend a week in the Falkland Islands (whose tiny capital of Stanley appears in the photo below).

Air travel can
be tiring, and the five-hour time difference with California didn’t help, but I
arrived in the Islands by mid-afternoon on a Saturday. Staying with friends – I
spent a year in the Islands three decades ago – I later enjoyed dinner with
them at Waterfront Kitchen Café, where Chilean chef Alex Olmedo oversees
a notably sophisticated menu. As an appetizer, the South
Georgia reindeer paté deserves a
story in itself, but I also chose the chimichurri-marinated local lamb rack for
my main dish.

Over the next
two days, I did a variety of town activities, including a visit to the
professionally transformed Historic Dockyard Museum complex (pictured above), but Tuesday and Wednesday were special
– I got to fly my favorite airline, the Falkland
Islands Government Air Service (FIGAS),
to the offshore wildlife paradises of Sea
Lion Island and Bleaker
Island. I always enjoy
the aerial views from their ten-seater Britten-Norman Islander aircraft, and I
also enjoy the fact that there’s no oppressive airport security – no full body
scans and feel free to take water on on-board - unless you count the fact that
FIGAS weighs its passengers to be able to balance the load.

I made only a
brief day visit to Sea Lion, a compact island with a modern lodge and easy
access to wildlife sites that include three species of penguins and my personal
favorite elephant seals. There are also orcas offshore, but none were around on
this day. In the afternoon, I flew to nearby Bleaker, where wool ranchers Mike
and Phyllis Rendell also encourage wildlife-oriented visitors to stay at their renovated
Cobb’s Cottage
and the newer Cassard House, which has four spacious bedrooms and
full-board service. On a quick Land Rover tour around the island’s north end,
we saw hundreds of Gentoo penguins and king cormorants, but also a solitary fur
seal who had hauled himself ashore at a site where such sightings are infrequent (wool and wildlife appear to be compatible!).

At present, there’s
only one flight weekly between Punta Arenas and the
Islands – I’d have like to stay at least another few days - but, once you get
back to the continent, you can tour Tierra del Fuego, Torres del Paine, and other
thrillingly remote destinations. I’ve done that many times myself, but to me
it’s also special to lodge on small offshore islands like Sea Lion and Bleaker,
where you can explore the penguin-rich seashore and marine mammal colonies with
just a handful of other guests around – and often you’re the only one of your
kind.

Many of my Argentine and Chilean friends did, and I was quick to sympathize with them, but sympathy and genuine empathy are different matters. Even after I married an Argentine, and heard her tales of life under tyranny, I never felt those sorts of emotion until last Tuesday, when the unspeakable Donald Trump – a disgracefully corrupt racist and misogynist authoritarian - became president-elect of my own country. Even though Trump’s Republican campaign may have broken no rules – except perhaps those of poor taste – it felt like a coup.

Before leaving for Santiago, where I arrived Thursday morning, I wrote my friend Marializ Maldonado about these demoralizing developments. Marializ, now a journalist, was a university student when I met her, and her brother Víctor – expelled from the Universidad de Chile for his political activity – now works in crisis management at Chile’s Interior Ministry. I recall that, not long after I met them, we went to a small clandestine labor union retreat near the beach town of Los Vilos, and issues of how to deal with life under dictatorship were part of the discussion. I also heard a wealth of Pinochet jokes, which I won’t go into at present.

Marializ’s response to Trump’s victory was immediate support – “It’s macabre... Now we have to show solidarity with you the way you did to us for so many years.” When I sent her a copy of the California legislative leadership’s response to the events – a statement on protecting immigrants and minorities threatened by the incoming president and his lackeys – she found it “Inspiring! That’s the right attitude.”

My Argentine wife and her brother especially suffered far more under the Argentine dictatorship – his first wife disappeared shortly after giving birth to a son, and only recently did they locate her remains. That said, Pinochet and the Argentine junta lacked the immense capacity for outright destruction – especially internationally – that Trump does.

So, you look for bright spots, and I encountered one Wednesday morning at Oakland International Airport as I went to board a short flight to Los Angeles. As I went through security and greeted the TSA agent – a middle-aged black woman - with the cheeriest “good morning” I could muster, she replied by asking me how I was. When I responded that I hadn’t slept much the previous night, she said hadn’t been able to either. When I suggested it was probably for the same reason, she responded with a big hug – rather than a frisk - that lifted my spirits.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

For more than a
quarter century now, I’ve been writing and updating guidebooks on southernmost
South America for several different publishers. In general, most of my work
takes place from autumn (the austral spring) to the northern spring (austral
autumn), so I’ve often joked that I leave California after the World Series and
return in time for Opening Day. It’s not such a joke, though, that as the days
shorten and the baseball draws to an end, seasonal
affective disorder becomes an overlapping issue (with “sports affective
disorder,” as baseball is the only spectator sport I find worthwhile).

Fortunately
the longer days, filled with work, help me get through the winter - unlike the
late Hall of Famer Rogers
Hornsby who famously said that "People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

Generally, I consider South America a sports desert, but there was a
South American link to the end of the baseball season, though it didn’t turn
quite as I had hoped. Last year, reserve outfielder Paulo Orlando became the
first Brazilian ever to play on a World Series, as his Kansas City
Royals defeated the New York Mets in five games (for non-baseball fans, I’ll
state here that the first team to win four games out of a maximum seven becomes
the champion). This year, reserve catcher Yan Gomes could have become
the second player to do so, but his Cleveland
Indians lost Game Seven in extra innings to the Chicago Cubs (Gomes began
the season as Cleveland’s starting catcher, but a separated shoulder forced him
onto the disabled list for an extended time).

It had never
occurred to me to try to locate the world’s southernmost baseball diamond, but
I’m guessing it might be in Christchurch,
New Zealand (latitude 43° 33’ S). I’ll be asking, this time, as I drive
south from Santiago, in hopes of finding one nearer the South Pole, on either the Chilean or Argentine side.

Before then,
though, I’ll be flying farther south to Punta Arenas and then to
the Falkland Islands,
where I have seen locals with cricket bats. There, in the capital of
Stanley, I once played catch with crewmen from a Japanese fishing vessel who
were stunned that somebody in the Islands could throw them a curveball. I don’t
expect that to happen again, but the memory will serve until I return home in
February, when the days get longer and spring training starts. Pitchers and
catchers report on February 13th.

Argentina Travel Adventures App

With more than 30 years living and traveling in Latin America, I write guidebooks to the "Southern Cone" countries - so called because of their shape on the map - of Chile and Argentina. I'm especially interested in the remote, scenic Patagonian region overlapping the two countries. I am the sole author of Moon Handbooks to Argentina; Chile & Easter Island; Buenos Aires, including the city's hinterland and coastal Uruguay; and Patagonia, including the Falkland Islands.
I have a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and have done research in Peru, Chile, Argentina and the Falklands, where I spent a year as a Fulbright-Hays scholar.
My home base is Oakland, California, but I spend five months a year in southern South America. I often stay in Buenos Aires, where my Argentine wife and I have a second home, an apartment in the barrio of Palermo.
I speak fluent Spanish, less fluent German, serviceable Portuguese and desperation French.
Any questions, please contact me at southerncone (at) mac.com, or leave comments by clicking on the word "comment" at the bottom of each entry. Comments are moderated, but I get to them quickly.